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Education customers, especially those with endless banks of datacenter servers, were telling Sun and its competitors that energy consumption had become a serious issue — that a modern datacenter could draw as much power as a good-sized city. With customers' growing concerns about climate change, along with their ongoing need to cut costs, energy use had become — well, a powerful issue.

Computing Is Becoming An Environmental Threat
Transforming the IT sector is no small task. "I saw an IDC report the other day that the cost of operating power servers is going to surpass the cost to buy them sometime in the next five years or so," says Sun Vice President for Eco-Responsibility Dave Douglas. "And when that starts to happen, that's a pretty big shift in people's mindsets. In some ways, IT is going to be important to sustainability."

But one might also ask, "Is IT itself sustainable?" Says Douglas: "I think today we really have to answer, 'No, it's not.' It's using a lot of energy and generating a lot of waste.

"We build hundreds of thousands of servers every year, so tackling the server energy issue is at the forefront of all of our thinking these days," says Douglas. "It's estimated that the total greenhouse gas emissions of servers is upwards of 200 million tons of carbon dioxide in the U.S. alone right now. And if you gather up the worldwide statistics, I believe the number might be as high as a billion tons of CO2." That's a significant chunk of the roughly 27 billion tons emitted worldwide by all human activity each year.

Sun's Eco-Responsible Products Slashes Power Requirements
As a technology company, Sun's prime contribution to eco-responsibility is centered on innovation that benefits both the customer's business and the environment by improving energy efficiency, choosing less harmful materials, and encouraging reuse and recycling.

Consider this: A large organization datacenter with 1000 servers consumes 7.02 million Kw/year — without including refrigeration, physical space requirements, and other factors.

If this same organization used Sun Fire servers based on UltraSPARC T1 processors introduced in the CoolThreads product line November 2005, consumption would be only 73,080 Kw/year, a difference of more than 6.9 million Kw/year. That's enough energy to power the electric energy needs of 2316 typical homes for a full year and would save $3.9 million USD in electricity within only three years, on average.

The UltraSPARC T1 CPU: Ideal for High-Throughput Web Applications
It is no secret that to reduce costs, enterprises have deployed large volumes of inexpensive servers with inexpensive chips at the edge of IT infrastructures. It's common to see scores of commodity Web servers supporting large Web applications.

The trouble with this strategy is that it's still expensive to buy a lot of servers. It's difficult to manage the servers. The servers take up a lot of space. And it costs a fortune in power to cool the servers. As a result, today's university datacenter administrators are running out of space, while paying ever-increasing costs to procure, manage, and run Web application infrastructures.

For multi-threaded applications — such as Web serving, application serving, and lightweight database serving — where datacenters have traditionally racked up large numbers of inexpensive servers, the UltraSPARC T1 processor offers the opportunity to replace many of those servers with a single server that uses much less power.

Of course, UltraSPARC T1-based Sun Fire servers are not for every application. There are still areas where clock speed matters, such as in high performance computing. For applications that require fast floating-point calculations and for single-threaded applications, a Sun x64 or a traditional SPARC might make more sense. But for multi-threaded applications, the UltraSPARC T1 processor is specifically designed to address the needs of today's datacenters.

The UltraSPARC T1 Processor Curtails Costs and Energy Use
By offering more throughput in a smaller package, UltraSPARC T1-based Sun Fire servers herald a number of cost savings. In addition to direct cost savings through server consolidation, UltraSPARC T1-based servers can help reduce indirect costs. The most obvious example results from having to maintain and manage a significantly smaller and more standardized datacenter. Also, by consolidating server infrastructure, UltraSPARC T1-based servers allow enterprises to reduce the number of software licenses needed to support an application.

With UltraSPARC T1 processors, enterprises need fewer servers to support a typical Web application, and that means fewer servers to cool. And by reducing the amount of server space needed to support an application, the UltraSPARC T1 processor can help shrink datacenter real estate, which means less space to cool. While those are the obvious energy efficiencies created by the UltraSPARC T1 processor, the chip helps reduce cooling costs by forgoing the futile emphasis on clock speed prevalent in today's Intel-based servers.

Enterprises spent a lot of time and money switching from SPARC to x86, so why would they move back? Well, why wouldn't they? First, for people who moved to Linux, it is easy to move back to the Solaris OS. Second, UltraSPARC T1-based servers will save enterprises a significant amount in hardware procurement and maintenance. And UltraSPARC T1-based servers can dramatically improve server utilization and reduce cooling costs. There's no need to rewrite applications when you switch to UltraSPARC T1-based servers. Making the switch simply allows you to run your applications more efficiently.

Niagara 2: The Next Evolution in CoolThreads Technology
Building on the success of the UltraSPARC T1, Niagara 2 represents the next giant step in CoolThreads technology. Due for release in the second half of 2007, the processor taped out in April 2006 and promises to deliver even greater levels of throughput and power efficiency across a broader range of workloads and markets.

Niagara 2 is based on a 65 nm manufacturing process, enabling Sun to deliver an entire "system on a chip" that provides multiple benefits to customers deploying the second generation of this breakthrough technology:

	•	Higher Throughput: Increasing threads per core from 4 to 8 to deliver up to 64 simultaneous threads in a single Niagara 2 processor, resulting in at least 2x throughput of the current UltraSPARC T1 processor — all within the same power and thermal envelope
	•	More Performance per Watt: Eighty to 100 percent higher performance per watt and a 3x to 4x higher SWaP (Space, Watts, and Performance) ratio for even greater datacenter efficiency and cost reduction
	•	Chip-Level Innovation: The integration of one floating point unit per core (rather than one per processor) to deliver 10x higher throughput on applications with high floating point content such as scientific, technical, simulation, and modeling programs

Learn More and Save
See how CoolThreads outperforms the competition, try a unit at no charge, and take advantage of Education-only deep discounts:

	•	Head of the Class: Fire servers with CoolThreads technology beat IBM and Dell on performance, power consumption, and space
	•	Education Only – Save 30% or More: Take an exclusive discount of 30 percent or more on Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology
	•	Take a No-Risk Trial: Try a Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 server with CoolThreads technology at no cost for 60 days

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